National Security Experts Weigh in on the “Apple v. FBI” Battle

“Apple is being mischievous here,” two national security experts at the Brookings Institution warned in a blog post last week, “and the company’s self-presentation as crusading on behalf of the privacy of its customers is largely self-congratulatory nonsense.”

Two days after Apple announced that it would challenge the FBI’s request for help bypassing the auto-erase function on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c, national security scholars Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes chimed into the debate with their blog post titled “Apple is Selling You a Phone, Not Civil Liberties.”

“… the problem is not just that Apple is refusing all possible solutions—though the company is certainly doing that,” Hennessey and Wittes argue in their post. “The problem is that Apple is actively—and we think somewhat duplicitously—using its various positions … to map out a zone of immunity for itself, a kind of legal black hole in which nobody can force it to do anything.”

After publishing their article, the pair said they received some negative responses, so they turned to Reddit to give the “Apple v. FBI” debate some expert testimony by opening themselves to users’ questions through an AMA (Ask Me Anything):

“[Our article] made many of you feel feelings and evoked some strong opinions,” they explained on Reddit. “But part of our job is to put forward ideas so they can be vigorously debated and vigorously challenged and we all get smarter in the process. So here we are.”

Is the FBI Telling the Truth?

When redditor ElectronTwistor posed a series of questions—including whether the FBI is truly incapable of decrypting a phone and why the agency won’t accept one hacker’s offer to do it pro bono—the Brookings scholars responded pragmatically:

Is It Worth the “Vast Amounts of Money and Human Effort”?

Redditor abiggerhammer took issue with one statement in particular from the “Apple is Selling You a Phone, Not Civil Liberties” piece, writing in a comment that they were “shocked by the uncharitability and obsequiousness” of the following quote:

“And that was a matter of its own choosing made despite repeated warnings from the government that this choice would cause substantial problems for law enforcement, national security investigators, and public safety.”

Abiggerhammer concluded their comment by asking the piece’s authors this question: “Is it worth trying to set this kind of precedent—the vast amounts of money and human effort it will cost, the bad precedent it will set—so that the government can save face over a destruction-of-evidence mistake?”